Jay Miner

Jay Miner designed the Agnus chip, which is one of the most central chips in the now obsolete OCS architechture, which was installed in the first generation of Amigas.

Jay brought his dog, Mitchy to work every day. Legend says that he would show his chip designs to Mitchy. If the dog wagged her (*) tail, the design made it to the chip.

If you didn't already know, the Amiga 1000, the first Amiga model has the names of all the desing team molded underneath the top cover. The paw print is Mitchy's.

Here is the message posted on Jay's BBS, "The Mission", after he passed away.

From Gary Chow MSG 48 OF 53
To All Has Reply 49
Date Sun 26 Jun 94 13:18
Subject Jay Miner
Jay Miner passed away June 20, 1994, at the El Camino Hospital in Mountain
View. The actual cause of death was heart failure, but it was the result of
kidney complications. A private memorial service will be held in July.
He'll be greatly missed and much remembered.

(*) Mitchy's gender is not 100%, but I'm quite certain it is female. /msg me if you have 100% information!

One thing that is amazing about the products that Jay Miner produced is that they were not only extremely advanced in their own right, but they also had the capability of being hacked by clever programmers to go far beyond their original intentions. For example, the Stella chip was only really designed to do a damn good recreation of Circus Atari or Space Invaders. The fact that you can find games with unbelievable graphics (for the platform) such as Solaris and California Games on the Atari is support of this idea.